It would be wrong to claim that I first met the German artist Hito Steyerl on such-and-such day, in such-and-such city, where the weather was bright or blustery, and that she arrived suitably dressed for this season or the next. It is more accurate to say that she simply appeared while I was waiting in the atrium of the Communist Party court, under a spectacular red banner from which the faces of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin bore down on me. One minute I was alone, and the next she was there—all yellow and smooth, except for the thick black cubes of her hands and her large, impassive face. Four black cats trailed her, in place of her shadow. “I spawned a lot of them, so they have multiplied,” she murmured. Suddenly, a kitten wobbled out from between her legs. “I made a baby!” she cried. When I tried to balance a puffer fish on my own blocky hand to feed the kitten, I pressed the wrong button, and kicked it instead.
Kicking kittens is, I believe, usually discouraged, but in Minecraft, the sandbox video game in which players extract raw materials—water, wood, sugarcane, coal ore, gold, lapis lazuli—and use them to craft three-dimensional Legolands, the stakes of violence seem lower. The game is “a very good metaphor for how platforms really work,” Steyerl told me. Platforms seduce their users into performing the unpaid work of content creation—uploading the texts, photographs, videos, and music that are the raw material of the digital world—while mining their metadata to create new markets for corporate and military surveillance. “Many of the other platforms are quite devious,” she said. “We don’t really know whether your face is being used to train facial-recognition algorithms or something like that.” In the digital economy, free labor tenders a self-replenishing vein of gold for capital’s pickaxe.
At fifty-six, Steyerl, who is of German and Japanese descent, has become one of the most revered figures in the mercurial world of contemporary art, with solo exhibitions at the Armory, in New York City, the Serpentine Galleries, in London, and the Academy of Arts, in Berlin. Her work is animated by an anti-capitalist, anti-surveillance sensibility cut by a measured and mischievous sense of humor. Among her best-known pieces is “How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .Mov File,” in which, across five satirical lessons, she hides behind placards, places boxes over her head, and smears a green goo on her face that allows her to blend in with the satellite-resolution targets shown on the green screen behind her. Her silent physical comedy is counterpoised by a creaking animatronic voice that announces, “Today, most important things want to remain invisible. Love is invisible. War is invisible. Capital is invisible.” And although people can make themselves invisible for laughs, as Steyerl does, they can also be made invisible by the state and by capital—“annihilated, eliminated, eradicated, deleted, dispensed with, filtered, processed, selected, separated, wiped out,” the voice observes, while the camera moves through an architectural rendering of a pristine, unpeopled luxury living space.
In 2017, Steyerl became the first woman to top the ArtReview Power 100 list, for her “political statement-making and formal experimentation.” It is easy to imagine how squeamish she must have felt upon receiving this honor. In the past decade, she has created several large-scale installations, such as “Is the Museum a Battlefield?” and “Drill,” that stage savage, if also playful, critiques of the museums, galleries, banks, universities, and governments that have transformed contemporary art into “a hash for all that’s opaque, unintelligible, and unfair, for top-down class war and all-out inequality.” In September, when the German government attempted to award her the Federal Cross of Merit, she declined, denouncing the country’s failure to support the arts during lockdown. Steyerl harbors no romantic illusions about her work. “I never got into being an artist,” she proclaimed, a rare hint of pride in her voice. “For me, it’s always more research, storytelling, maybe technological experimental. It’s more like a laboratory setting.”
The pandemic was her latest laboratory. One of the biggest shows of her career, a retrospective titled “Hito Steyerl: I Will Survive,” opened at the K21 museum, in Düsseldorf, in September, 2020, but quickly pivoted online when Germany lurched into its second lockdown. So did Steyerl’s teaching at the Universität der Künste (UdK) Berlin, where she has held a distinguished professorship since 2010. Turning to Minecraft and Zoom during the pandemic was “like being stuck between a rock and a hard place,” she said with a sigh. She and her graduate assistant Matthias Planitzer started to create different worlds—or “builds,” in gamespeak—to stage performances and host exhibitions. It was Planitzer whom Steyerl dispatched to her studio to teach me how to move my Minecraft avatar while we talked over Zoom. Her background displayed a hailstorm of cats with rainbow coats, who, as they fell, streaked the screen like the iridescent tails of a thousand comets.
The Communist Party court, where our avatars first encountered each other, was built for a class production of Bertolt Brecht’s controversial 1930 play “The Decision,” a Lehrstücke (teaching play). The play follows four Communist agitators on their return to Moscow from China, where they have tried to start a revolution, donning masks and assuming covert identities to organize workers illegally. Before a central committee, they confess to having killed a Young Comrade—a revolutionary so overwhelmed with pity and compassion for the workers that he tore off his mask and declared his allegiance to the Communist Party. The Agitators shoot him and throw him into a lime pit, where his face is burned beyond recognition. In the play’s chilling final scene, the central committee exonerates the Agitators for the murder, as their commitment to help “disseminate the ABC of Communism” excuses their actions.
Steyerl’s staging of “The Decision” in Minecraft doubles down on the Brechtian notion of Verfremdung, or estrangement: the literary technique of removing an event or character from its familiar context to jar the viewer into a new alertness about the political conditions under which art is made. The estrangement Brecht produced with masks and tableaux is amplified in a virtual setting, where the actors are crude craft-block figures and their voices have been dialled in through Zoom. The idea of burning the Young Comrade’s face is laughable; his avatar has no distinctive face. The idea of killing him is nonsense; the avatar was never alive in the first place. At the end of Steyerl’s Lehrstücke, when the Agitators await their verdict, we arrive at the classic Brechtian twist of a shocking realization: Are any of us truly alive in the digital world? Can you consider yourself alive when your actions, your emotions, and your language are shaped by vast corporate entities whose only function is to generate capital?
Yet replacing an actor with an avatar struck me as oddly charming, just as the worlds our avatars moved in were enchanting—beautiful, even. I followed Steyerl and her cats to the build’s central teleportation station, a gray platform surrounded by delicately latticed columns and low-hanging white slabs, as if God had sculpted his densest clouds into Tetris pieces. Nearby was a replica of the World Clock, which has towered over Alexanderplatz since 1969. In the sky, a screen played the Rickroll meme. Steyerl led me to a concrete wall with five wooden levers. Each lever would teleport us to a different world: a forest sanctuary, a dream garden, a castle in the sky, an Andalusian farm—“You can ride the pigs,” Planitzer promised me—and the UdK campus.
We teleported first to the castle in the sky, where I promptly fell off—Steyerl taught me how to fly by pressing the space bar repeatedly—then to the forest sanctuary, where we arrived on the edge of a dark-blue river, and each boarded our own wooden rowboat. Steyerl’s got stuck in the current. “Can I try to get into your boat?” she asked. She leapt and fell in the water. “I’ll just fly,” she assured me. She had not been here for weeks, and seemed truly astonished by how the sanctuary now teemed with life: pink parrots, giant squid. She darted through the cherry trees crowding the banks—“Oh, the cherries are blossoming! That’s very nice!”—and began her slow ascent, past the weeping willows and the camphor laurels, to the top of a Japanese pagoda that slowly entered the frame the higher she soared above it. My fingers had forgotten how to fly, so I entered the pagoda and stumbled up one ladder after another to reach her. From there, the view of the lush, unconquered forest was so majestic that one could almost ignore the pixelation of the horizon.
We debated teleporting to the farm. “Do you have the coördinates?” Steyerl asked Planitzer.
He admitted that he couldn’t remember. “If you mix it up, you end up dead,” he told me. I wondered what it meant to die but could not bring myself to ask.
When we returned to the central teleportation station, I pressed the wrong button, kicked another one of Steyerl’s cats, and blew a cinder block out of the ground. I sensed our session was reaching its end. When Matthias turned off the computer monitor in the studio, I looked out the window at the sky. Its unblinking blue seemed suddenly unreal.
Last April, when most of Germany’s restaurants and cafés were still closed, Steyerl and I met for a walk around Berlin’s Hasenheide Park, on the border of the rapidly gentrifying district of Kreuzberg, where she has lived for the past two decades. She wore all black and spoke very softly, with a deep intelligence leavened by good humor. In conversation, Steyerl seems more comfortable discussing the kind of abstract ideas that she invokes in her essays than narrating her own life. In the spirit of reciprocity, or perhaps deflection, she often volleyed the questions I asked back at me. (“But what do you think about institutions? Reform or revolution?”) Still, a picture started to come into focus.
Steyerl was born in Munich on New Year’s Day of 1966. She spent her childhood on the Garching research campus, which contained the tremendous egg-shaped FRM 1 nuclear reactor, where her father, Albert, worked as a physicist. He was a graduate student at M.I.T. when he met her mother, Nagako, who was finishing her degree in biochemistry at Wellesley. When the couple moved from Boston to Munich, she was not permitted to work, because the German government refused to recognize credentials issued by an American institution. Steyerl and her younger brother spent most weekends in the computer room outside their father’s laboratory, fiddling with punch cards and waiting for Albert—EinSteyerl, his colleagues called him—to trap slow neutrons in glass bottles. “I’ve always been interested in exploring technique in relation to technology,” Steyerl said. In her father’s laboratory, she first perceived “the nexus, the battleground where they both merge and struggle.”
In 1987, when she was twenty-one, Steyerl moved to Kanagawa, in the foothills of Mount Fuji, to study at the Japan Institute of the Moving Image. The school, which accepted students who had no degrees, was “a sort of retirement home for old cinematic communists,” she joked. Its founder, Shōhei Imamura, was a luminary of Japanese New Wave cinema, known for his harshly realist films about prostitutes, bar hostesses, and straggling theatre troupes. Steyerl did not attend classes all that often. Instead, she learned Japanese, trained in karate for five hours a day—“It was like poetry,” she murmured—and, like many of her classmates, turned to the world of pornography. She adopted her best friend’s name as a pseudonym and, as “Andrea,” worked as a bondage model in three or four nawa shibari shoots. (In her documentary “Lovely Andrea,” from 2007, Steyerl hunts down the images, low-lit shots in which she lies splayed or spread-eagled with rope coiled around her body. “It was kind of embarrassing” to find them, she admits. “Life is just embarrassing.”)
After finishing her degree, in 1990, Steyerl stayed in Japan, where she worked as an assistant to Wim Wenders as he was making “Until the End of the World.” The film, which was shot in eleven countries, is part road movie, part thriller, and features strange, sweeping shots of landscapes from Moscow to the Australian outback. Wenders and his crew had been given access to a new technology produced by Sony called HDTV, or High Vision, which allowed them to fast-forward, slow down, and superimpose images onto one another. Steyerl worked as a video assistant, processing clips for the film’s dream sequences. When she returned to Berlin, she found it a vicious place, “drunk with national feelings” about reunification. She moved to Munich and enrolled in the University of Television and Film in 1991. Moving away from Wenders’s cutting-edge technology, she used cheap digital camcorders to make films that exposed the racism and xenophobia of post-unification life. Her earliest projects—“Germany and the Ego” (1994), “Babenhausen” (1997), “The Empty Center” (1998), and “Normality 1-X (1999-2001)”—share this commitment.
In 1998 her friend Andrea was executed in Turkey, where she was fighting alongside the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. “November,” the 2004 film Steyerl made to honor her, opens with footage from a silent spaghetti Western that she and Andrea shot when they were seventeen, in which three girls in plunging shirts and leather jackets “beat up every male they can get their hands on,” as Steyerl’s voice-over explains. Steyerl’s tribute takes the awkward, exhilarating footage of the girls and slows it down, speeds it up, and intersperses it with found clips: Kurdish news reports that show Andrea organizing workers in a camp in Iraq; dubbed kung-fu fight sequences; pornographic pinups; and shaky videos of Germans protesting the government’s support for Turkey’s persecution of the Kurds. “There are strange coincidences with the material we shot almost fifteen years earlier,” the voice-over notes, in which only men carry guns while women battle with their bare hands. “We are constantly fighting, probably for justice.”
Steyerl and I arrived at the Rosengarten, at the center of the park, where we sat on a bench under one of the pergolas ringed around the park’s pale, pink roses. I told her about my mother, who emigrated from southern Turkey to New York in 1989, after becoming alarmed by the nationalism of Turkish politics. She took her citizenship test in Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory, the site of “Drill,” an exhibit featuring an enormous three-screen video work that Steyerl made in 2019. Drill Hall is New York City’s largest unobstructed interior, famous for its barrel-vaulted roof and its gray-green walls inlaid with gun cabinets. In the basement of this building, in which my mother became an American and which today regularly hosts concerts and contemporary-art exhibitions, there is a shooting range, its bullet-strewn wall a reminder that the Armory had been a Union Army training site in the nineteenth century, and that certain kinds of splendor are inextricable from state-sanctioned violence. “Drill” excavates this history by incorporating interviews with historians and survivors of mass shootings. It veers from low-resolution footage to gorgeous, melancholy flourishes: a tour of the Armory in low, rich light; the spectacle of the Yale Precision Marching Band, playing a score that was algorithmically composed with data pertaining to gun violence and the weapons industry. “A building is a very interesting frame,” she explained. “You always get a sort of sample of different people inside a building.”
There is a sobriety and sentimentality to “Drill” that seems, in retrospect, to startle even Steyerl. She speaks with flat, unconfident feeling of the building as a “palimpsest,” an archeological dig in which she could see all the people whose histories had crossed superimposed onto one another. She wonders if she had “maybe foolishly” agreed to a project of this size, and with such an uncomplicated message. Listening to her second-guess herself, one suspects that she is an exceptionally demanding interpreter of her own work, and that she holds herself to the highest standards of humor and play in even her most aggressive critiques.
The most intriguing experiment to come out of Steyerl’s lockdown laboratory is a multimedia installation called “SocialSim,” which was exhibited this past summer at the Pompidou Center, where “I Will Survive” travelled after its short-lived stay in Düsseldorf. The piece takes its name from a glitch in a neural network that Steyerl built, which she had trained to say “SocialSim,” but which said “socialism” instead. The smallest of errors, the reversal of two letters, suggests the chasm between two worlds: “socialism,” a world of redistributed power, and “SocialSim,” a world of simulations, of high-resolution images that aim to deceive us about the nature of reality.
The visitor to the glass-walled Pompidou steps out of the melting light of June into a cool, black room covered with reflective black vinyl. Before her eyes can adjust, red laser beams begin to carve into the dark, and a familiar song starts to play. The track is purely instrumental, but the lyrics, she discovers, are already implanted in her mind: “Whether you’re a brother or whether you’re a mother / You’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive / Feel the city breakin’ and everybody shakin’ / And we’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.” On the wall opposite her, a legion of expressionless, computer-generated construction workers and police officers wearing gray aviator sunglasses march forward, and then stop. They turn to one another. Then, still expressionless, they begin to dance.
It is as if someone hidden in the dark room has flipped a switch, turning the world from its dystopian to its utopian setting. The policemen whirl. They backflip. Haloed by the laser beams, they leap with a grim, mechanical ecstasy, surrounding the visitor in a tangle of limbs and splintering red lights. After almost two years of isolation, of shuttered clubs and forlorn dance floors, the desire to dance with strange men hits hard. Feet begin to shuffle, hips to rock—then the visitor stops in a moment of shocking recognition. Are police officers really the people with whom she wants to dance? Can she trust them to help her stay alive when they are the people who lay claim to the legitimate use of force on their fellow-citizens, and who sometimes use that power to harass, to rape, to kill? The lurching of the officers loses its fluidity, its charm. A menu flashes across the wall. “Would you prefer to die by illness, by police, by starvation, by dancing?” it asks.
On the other side of the wall runs a narrow galley lined with blue exercise balls. The visitor bobs up and down as she watches a lecture called “The Benefits of Automation for the Actor/Actress,” delivered by the actor Mark Waschke, who is famous throughout Germany for playing a detective on “Tatort,” a popular police procedural. Waschke explains that, while he was furloughed during the pandemic, he found work as a motion-capture model. He lent his face and his figure to the computer-generated police avatars used in software that simulates the movements of potentially riotous crowds to help the authorities figure out how to control them. With the help of a split screen, with Waschke on one side and his avatar on the other, he demonstrates what his new job entails. He moves his handsome face, shaping his mouth into an ugly snarl, then a choked scream, and watches with great self-satisfaction as the avatar follows suit. With startling grace, his body dances the moves that the visitor recognizes from the other side of the wall. “I would like to be able to have him backflip,” he says, shouting at the avatar on his computer screen. “I would like to be able to have him backflip—by putting his ass on the ground.”
Waschke calls this “a Hegel backflip,” recalling a line from “Elements of the Philosophy of Right,” in which Hegel writes, “the abstraction of production causes work to be continually more mechanical, until it is at last possible for man to step out and let the machine take his place.” In “SocialSim,” we see what the rise of the machines might look like. On the one hand, as the pandemic has made obvious, automation causes laborers, including artists and actors, to lose their jobs, forcing them into precarious service work that is politically and aesthetically horrifying. On the other, it holds out the techno-utopian promise—however dubious and, in this case, equally horrifying—that the replacement of living labor by machines will mean that, one day, no one will have to be a police officer or a medic at all. No human being will be tasked with wielding the violent authority of the state. Soon our only option may be to die by dancing with the avatars.
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